When Good Games Go Bad! (Games Blog Banter)

“Welcome, welcome to the 5th instalment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed to bs angel. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!”

A really well designed and executed game can be a wondrous thing – but what happens to even the best of ideas and game concepts when they’re hampered or even ruined by poor execution?
I’m sure we’ve experienced this kind of gaming frustration, in some ways it would be better if the game in question was just an absolute turkey from the outset than face this kind of disappoint. But when a good game is almost forced into being a bad one, either by a poor development team working on it or more often than not, publishers rushing to get a game out to hit a certain release and compromising the entire game in the process.

A Disappointing First Encounter

One such game which effectively got “ruined” by the publishers (Gametek) by being released too early was Frontier: First Encounters – a sequel to one of the greatest games of all time – Elite!

Frontier: First Encounters is a space based game that combines a variety of activities such as trading, fighting, spying, conducting mercenary missions and you could even be a pirate by attacking and stealing other ships cargo! This kind of game always really appealed to me – I think it was mainly the freedom to go out and make a profit in a variety of ways – perhaps it played upon the entrepreneur in me!

Due to a conflict between Braben and the game’s publishers Gametek, the game was shipped early, and as a result was riddled with bugs, such as an auto pilot that crashed. Although it sold well many reviewers were quite contemptuous of the game, seeing it as only half-finished. A patch was eventually released that addressed the vast majority of the bugs, rendering the game at last fully playable and into a “finished”, and some would argue only-then-releaseable, form.

Here’s the introduction to Frontier: First Encounters — how I had great expectations when I watched this for the first time having got the game home from the shop!

Hope For an Elite Future?

It is a dreadful shame that thus far, this was the last Elite game in the franchise, which despite several patches to try and fix the major problems, left a very sour taste in the mouth for all concerned. A true waste of great gaming potential – hopefully David Braben will have the last laugh when his much mooted Elite 4 — an online-based game appears on the market when he believes the time is right -when the technology is right and ultimately when it is finished!

Until then, I will have to just console myself with how good it was given the situation surrounding it’s release and look forward to how good the next Elite game should be under full control of David Braben as it should be – just so you know, if needed I’m always available to help with some beta testing when the time comes!

You can watch a demonstration video of some of the features of the game (when it was working) and hopefully it brings back some good memories for you…

Do you share my frustrations over Elite: First Encounters? I never got to see the Thargoids because I gave up on the game in the end!

Have you found any other games which capture the same kind of gameplay as the Elite games?